A philosophy professor stands before a class and poses a problem. Two people are drowning. One is your mother. The other two are strangers. You can save your mother or you can save the two strangers. Which do you choose? The utilitarian arithmetic says two lives outweigh one. Every instinct in the room says save your mother. Larissa MacFarquhar (b. 1968) opens her 2015 book Strangers Drowning with a version of this scene because it marks the spot where moral theory and human loyalty collide. She has spent her career standing on that spot, watching what people do there.
MacFarquhar has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. Her profile subjects include John Ashbery (1927-2017), Barack Obama (b. 1961), Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), Hilary Mantel (1952-2022), Derek Parfit (1942-2017), Richard Posner (b. 1939), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (b. 1977), David Chang (b. 1977), Robert Gottlieb (1931-2023), and Aaron Swartz (1986-2013). She has also written about child protective services, hospice care, dementia, adoption, battered women’s shelters, Hasidic custody disputes, the Falkland Islands, and the decision to stay in or leave a hometown. The list looks scattered. The preoccupation holds steady. She writes about people under moral pressure, and about situations where care, duty, judgment, risk, loyalty, and power cannot be pulled apart.
London to America
MacFarquhar was born in London in 1968. Her father, Roderick MacFarquhar (1930-2019), was a historian of modern China, a journalist, a television presenter, and a Labour member of Parliament. He wrote the three-volume The Origins of the Cultural Revolution and later held a chaired professorship at Harvard, where he directed the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Her mother, Emily MacFarquhar, covered East Asia as an editor for The Economist. The family home ran on scholarship, deadlines, politics, and the interpretation of a distant civilization to a domestic audience. A child in that house learns early that ideas are not decoration. Ideas are the family business, and the business has stakes.
When she was sixteen, the family moved to the United States. She arrived as a partial outsider, English enough to notice America and American enough, eventually, to belong to it. The double vision never left her work. She writes about American institutions, American towns, and American moral life with the attention of someone who once had to learn the country from scratch.
She attended Harvard College and graduated in 1990. She took no philosophy courses there, a fact she came to regret. Years later, the economist Tyler Cowen (b. 1962) asked her about her formal philosophical training. She told him she had none. She had wanted philosophy to be about the meaning of life, and the introductory classes resembled algebra, so she walked away, as many students do. Then she spent the next three decades reading philosophy for love and writing about philosophers with more penetration than most people who stayed for the degree. Her one deep channel into the field, she told an interviewer at The Rumpus, is the Anglo-American literature on demandingness, the question of how much morality requires of us. That question became her career.
Lingua Franca
Before The New Yorker, MacFarquhar worked as a senior editor at Lingua Franca and as an advisory editor at The Paris Review, and she wrote for Artforum, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, and Slate. In 1994 she conducted the Paris Review’s Art of Editing interview with Robert Gottlieb, an inventive piece that assembled the testimony of Gottlieb’s authors around the editor himself.
Lingua Franca deserves a moment. The magazine, which ran from 1990 to 2001, covered academic life the way Variety covered Hollywood. It reported tenure fights, theory wars, plagiarism scandals, and the status economy of the American university, and it did so for readers who wanted the ideas taken seriously and the professors observed closely. The magazine’s writers learned a rare skill there: how to treat a dispute over deconstruction or analytic ethics as human drama without cheapening the ideas. The professor wants truth, and also wants the corner office, the named chair, the invitation to the right conference. Both wants are real. A Lingua Franca writer had to hold both in view at once. MacFarquhar carried that training into everything she wrote afterward.
The Method
She joined The New Yorker in 1998, at twenty-nine. Over the following decade she developed a method that now stands as one of the recognized achievements of American literary journalism. The method has a goal, a set of prohibitions, and a borrowed instrument.
The goal is interiority. She wants the reader inside the subject’s head, seeing what the subject sees, thinking in the subject’s rhythms. Everything else follows from that.
The prohibitions come first. In Strangers Drowning she cut all physical description of her subjects. She explained the decision in a 2015 interview with The Guardian: “if you’re looking at someone’s physical appearance, you’re on the outside.” She grew suspicious of quotation for the same reason. Quotes look intimate because they come from the subject’s mouth, but on the page they hold the subject at arm’s length, an exhibit introduced by the writer. She also removed herself. The first person, in her view, plants the writer between the reader and the subject, and the writer keeps intercepting the reader’s attention. Cowen pressed her on physical description. She answered that a face is unique, so no description can call up the person in a reader’s mind. What description does instead is evoke a type, and evoking a type is the polite name for what she considers a malign practice, the inference of character from looks.
The borrowed instrument is free indirect style, the novelist’s technique in which third-person narration absorbs the vocabulary, tempo, and anxiety of a character’s mind. Jane Austen built her comedy on it. Flaubert built Madame Bovary on it. Reported journalism almost never uses it, because it requires the writer to know the subject’s inner weather well enough to reproduce it without inventing it. MacFarquhar earns the right through hours of interviews that walk a person through his life from the beginning. She has said such conversations can be revelatory for the subject too, since almost no one talks about the long movements of a life. People talk about the weekend, the movie, the dinner. She asks about the decades.
Parfit
Her profile of the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit, “How to Be Good,” ran in The New Yorker on September 5, 2011, and it shows the method at full power. Parfit believed that moral questions have true answers, as mathematical questions do, and that discovering those truths was the most urgent work a person could do in a short life. He believed that personal identity is far less deep a fact than people assume. What matters is psychological continuity and connection, and once you see this, the wall between yourself and other people thins. Parfit found the thought liberating and consoling. Other people came closer. His own death concerned him less.
MacFarquhar does not summarize this philosophy from a podium. She furnishes it. Parfit wears the same outfit every day so that clothing will never again consume a decision. He described his thinking self as a government minister at a desk who writes a question, places it in the out-tray, and twiddles his thumbs while unseen civil servants in a back room work furiously and return the answer to the in-tray. He absorbs the moods of the people around him, helplessly, especially their unhappiness. He read Kant for years with irritation, finding him grandiloquent and inconsistent, and then came to believe Kant was the greatest moral philosopher since the ancient Greeks, in part because he recognized in Kant his own emotional extremism, the temperament that cannot rest between everything and nothing. “There is something not-there about him,” she writes, and by the time the sentence arrives the reader has felt the not-thereness for pages. The profile leaves the reader with grandeur and cost together. Here is a man who dismantled the ordinary self and then had to live without one.
Posner
Ten years earlier she had turned the same instrument on a different temperament. Her 2001 profile of Richard Posner, the federal appellate judge and founder of the law-and-economics movement, presents a mind that has absorbed economic analysis so completely that efficiency, incentive, and unsentimental candor are no longer positions he holds. They are the way his perception works. He processes a custody dispute or a tort claim the way another man processes the weather. MacFarquhar withholds her verdict long enough for the reader to feel the pull of Posner’s logic, its speed and its freedom from cant. Then she lets the consequences of the logic come into view, and the reader must do the judging that the writer declined to do early.
This is her signature. She inhabits without surrendering. She delays evaluation until the reader has lived inside the subject’s own terms, and by then judgment has become hard, which is her point. Easy judgment, in her work, is a symptom of not yet understanding.
Strangers Drowning: Grappling with Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Overpowering Urge to Help appeared from Penguin Press in 2015. The book began with a philosophy paper. Susan Wolf (b. 1952) published “Moral Saints” in 1982 and asked whether we would even like a person who lived a perfectly moral life. Wolf suspected we would not. MacFarquhar found the question irresistible, because she recognized the resistance in herself and in everyone around her. We do not want moral perfection for a friend. We do not want it for ourselves.
Her first reporting foray was a piece on people who donate a kidney to a stranger. When she described these donors to friends, the friends assumed the donors were mentally ill. The reflex startled her, and the startle became the book. She had set out to understand what drives extreme altruists. She ended up writing, in alternating chapters, a history of why the rest of us distrust them.
The subjects hold themselves to standards most people would call impossible. Dorothy Granada, a nurse, ran a clinic for the poor in Nicaragua through years of Contra death threats. Baba Amte (1914-2008) founded a colony for leprosy patients in the Indian wilderness and raised his small children there, in huts without walls, knowing what panthers and disease might do. Sue and Hector Badeau of Philadelphia raised twenty-two children, most of them adopted, many with serious disabilities. Ittetsu Nemoto, a Buddhist priest in Japan, gave his life to counseling the suicidal until the work nearly killed him. Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman, a young Boston couple, lived on a fraction of their income and gave the rest to the most effective charities they could find, and Julia tormented herself over the deaths her small indulgences might cause. An animal activist MacFarquhar calls Aaron Pitkin devoted himself to chickens, the most numerous and least regarded of suffering creatures.
She needed a word for such people and rejected the obvious one. Saint carried too much religious and literary freight. She chose do-gooder because the sneer inside the word was her subject. Why is do-gooder an insult? Why does absolute goodness provoke suspicion, resentment, even hostility? The interstitial chapters trace the answer through Western culture. Literature finds the virtuous character boring or ridiculous, and reserves its love for the charming sinner. Freud and his descendants converted altruism into pathology, a symptom seeking a diagnosis. The codependency movement taught millions that excessive helping is a disease. Evolutionary psychology reduced generosity to strategy. Ordinary family feeling, the deepest force of all, recoils from a person who treats a stranger’s child as urgently as his own, because such a person seems to have betrayed the first loyalty.
MacFarquhar refuses both easy exits. She will not canonize her subjects, and she records what their commitments cost spouses and children who never volunteered. She will not pathologize them either, and she dismantles the lazy diagnoses one by one. Her conclusion cuts deeper than either exit. “What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence,” she writes. The rest of us maintain a merciful blindness to the suffering our comfort rides on. Do-gooders have forced themselves to know, and to keep knowing. For them, she observes, it is always wartime, and the peacetime rules about what a person may keep for himself never come into effect.
The book was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. Reviewers noticed what readers of her profiles already knew, that she had removed herself so thoroughly that the book reads like unmediated access to other minds, an intimacy that is also, as one critic observed, an illusion of objectivity, since every portrait passed through her choices.
A Studio in Virginia
In late 2018 she sat across from Tyler Cowen for his interview series. Cowen opened by asking whether virtuous people are easy to dislike. “Not to me, but to many others,” she said, and then explained that the hostility had been news to her when she began the book. Cowen tried the economist’s angle: if an extreme altruist can be harmed at low cost through the people he cares about, is he not doomed to a life of manipulation? She had noticed the opposite. Her altruists were unusually indifferent to opinion, insensitive to what others thought of their clothes, their choices, their oddity. The armor that lets a person give a kidney to a stranger also deflects the neighbors’ stares. Cowen asked what she would want if she developed dementia, whether she would want to be lied to, and whether she would apply her own standard to a sibling or a child. She drew the answer out and then admitted she did not know. The exchange is worth studying because it shows her in the subject’s chair, treating a hard question the way she hopes her subjects will, without a rehearsed answer.
She also told Cowen why she writes about the people she chooses. She writes about people she admires and does not altogether understand, and she writes to understand them better. The Rumpus interviewer asked whether she had ever considered living as her do-gooders live. She recalled realizing in college that the most moral course would be to earn a fortune and give it away. She became a writer instead. She offered no superior moral realization as cover. “I did it because I love it,” she said.
The Institutions of Care
Her later reporting moved from individual conscience to the institutions where conscience gets administered. She wrote about child protective services and family court, where the state must decide whether removing a child from a home protects the child or wounds the family beyond repair, and where both answers are sometimes true. She wrote about dementia care and the question of whether caregivers should enter a patient’s false world or keep correcting it, a piece that turns on what truth is worth when memory is gone. She wrote about hospice and what dying well might mean. She wrote about the battered women’s movement, about adoption, about a Hasidic mother’s fight to keep her children after leaving the community. She profiled Chelsea Manning after her release from military prison.
These pieces share a hard premise. Care is never pure benevolence. It is also triage, authority, uncertainty, and sometimes coercion. The social worker who saves one child traumatizes another. The comforting fiction that calms a dementia patient still changes what truth means inside that room. MacFarquhar seeks out exactly the situations that defeat slogans, and she stays in them longer than the slogans can survive.
The Hometown Book
Her announced second book moves from the ethics of strangers to the ethics of place. As a 2018 National Fellow at New America she described a book about the decision to stay in, leave, or return to a hometown, and how that decision shapes worldview and politics. A related Russell Sage Foundation project follows sibling pairs from three American families, one sibling who left and one who stayed. She has published pieces from this territory in The New Yorker, including reporting from Orange City, Iowa, on people who never leave. As of July 2026 the book has not appeared. The project extends her lifelong question by inverting it. Strangers Drowning asked what we owe the distant stranger. The hometown book asks what we owe the near, the given, the origin, and the self we might have become had we stayed.
The subject also returns her to her own life. She left a country at sixteen. Her family’s whole trade was interpreting one place to another. A writer who removed herself from her prose for twenty years has chosen, for her second book, the one question she cannot ask without her own biography standing quietly in the room.
Brooklyn
MacFarquhar is married to Philip Gourevitch (b. 1961), the New Yorker writer best known for We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, his 1998 book on the Rwandan genocide. They live in Brooklyn with their two children. The pairing invites a comparison that should be handled with care and then made anyway. Gourevitch reports public catastrophe, the aftermath of political evil, the survivor and the perpetrator. MacFarquhar reports private extremity, the interior cost of conscience, the caretaker and the saint. Both write from the far edge of human experience. He approaches the edge from history. She approaches it from the soul.
Her honors include two Front Page Awards from the Newswomen’s Club of New York and the Johnson & Johnson Excellence in Media Award. Her work has been selected for The Best American Political Writing and The Best American Food Writing. She has been a Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
The Contribution
MacFarquhar’s standing in American nonfiction rests on a rare combination. She has a novelist’s hunger for interiority, a moral philosopher’s appetite for hard cases, and a reporter’s refusal to invent. She once explained why she writes nonfiction rather than fiction. A novelist friend went on a reporting trip having imagined the people he would meet and the things they would say, and he came home frustrated because reality had contradicted him. She heard the story and understood herself. She cannot conjure a world from imagination, and she does not want to. The world as found is stranger than the world as invented, and people are stranger, more coherent, and more demanding than public argument allows.
Her discipline as a writer is to slow judgment down until a life becomes difficult again. Readers arrive at a MacFarquhar profile ready to admire too quickly, mock too easily, or condemn too confidently, and she takes those options away one at a time, by making the subject’s mind habitable. Whether the mind belongs to a philosopher who dissolved the self, a judge who priced it, or a nurse who gave it away, the effect is the same. The reader comes out the other side owning his judgment instead of borrowing it. In an age of instant verdicts, she has built a career on the delay.
Notes
The opening drowning scene comes from the introduction of Strangers Drowning, where a professor and student work through the choice between rescuing one’s mother or two strangers. The Peter Singer shallow-pond lineage is there too.
The Cowen studio scene draws on the Conversations with Tyler transcript, episode 58, recorded late 2018 and published January 16, 2019. This is the source for the “Not to me, but to many others” answer, the manipulation exchange, the altruists’ indifference to opinion, the dementia lying question and her “Ohhh, I don’t know,” the no-philosophy-classes admission, the algebra line, and her explanation of why she avoids physical description, meaning that faces are unique and description evokes rather than depicts. Also the Kenneth Tynan digression and her point about long-life-arc interviews being revelatory for subjects, which I used for her method, come from this transcript excerpt.
“I did it because I love it,” the earning-to-give recollection, the demandingness passage, and the novelist-friend anecdote come from the Rumpus interview, January 23, 2017.
The Guardian quote about physical description, “if you’re looking at someone’s physical appearance, you’re on the outside,” is quoted in this review essay, which attributes it to the 2015 Guardian piece. The line “What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence” is from Strangers Drowning.
Susan Wolf‘s “Moral Saints” as the book’s origin, the saint-to-do-gooder word choice, the kidney donor reaction, “surely all mentally ill,” and the wartime framing come from the Kirkus Reviews interview, September 29, 2015. Note: Kirkus Reviews dates Wolf’s paper to 1984. It appeared in The Journal of Philosophy in 1982, and I used 1982.
The Parfit material, including the minister and civil servants image, same outfit daily, mood absorption, the Kant arc, “There is something not-there about him,” and moral truths as mathematical truths, comes from the profile “How to Be Good,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2011. Excerpts are available at Medium and Habermas and Rawls. One source lists the issue as September 12. The September 5 issue date is better attested, but verify against The New Yorker archive.
Book subjects, including Granada, Baba Amte, the Badeaus, Nemoto, Pitkin, Wise, and Kaufman, come from Wikipedia, The Rumpus, and the Audible description. Note a discrepancy: Wikipedia says a couple adopted 20 children, while The Rumpus and Kirkus Reviews say 22. I used twenty-two and named the Badeaus, whom she profiled in “The Children of Strangers.”
Reasonable extrapolations, no link needed: The Lingua Franca passage, including the variety-of-academia comparison, the professor who wants truth, and the named chair, extrapolates from the magazine’s known character and run, 1990-2001. The description of her family home, the double vision of the immigrant at sixteen, and the closing paragraph on the hometown book returning her to her own biography are interpretive but self-evident from the facts. The Posner section characterizes “The Bench Burner,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2001, from its reputation and your draft. If you want direct scene detail from it, I can fetch the text.
Inside: The Hero System of Larissa MacFarquhar
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that every man needs to feel he is a hero, an object of primary value in a world of meaning, and that every culture is a hero system, a shared screenplay that tells its members what counts as a significant life and what they must do to earn one. The hero system exists because the alternative is unbearable. A creature that knows it will die cannot get out of bed each morning on biology alone. It needs a project that outlasts the body, and it needs that project to feel like truth rather than a coping device, which is why a man will forgive almost any insult before he forgives an insult to his hero system.
Larissa MacFarquhar built hers against two terrors.
The first is the terror of the outside. Every man lives sealed in one consciousness. He infers other minds from faces and words but he never verifies them, and he will die without having once confirmed that anyone else was home. Most people never feel this as terror because their hero systems keep them busy. MacFarquhar felt it early and organized her life around the breach. Her stated ambition as a writer, repeated across decades of interviews, is to put the reader inside another head, seeing what the subject sees, thinking in the subject’s rhythm. The phrase sounds like craft talk. Read against Becker it is a rescue operation. If the wall between minds can be breached even once, on the page, then solitude is a condition and not a sentence, and death loses one of its rehearsals.
The second is the terror of the verdict. Judgment arrives before understanding almost everywhere. The dinner party judges, the newsroom judges, the family judges, and the judgment lands on a man who was never entered, never known, condemned in absentia by people working from his surface. MacFarquhar treats the premature verdict as a small death dealt to another person, a killing of the inner man while the outer one still walks. Her entire method, the profiles that withhold evaluation for ten thousand words, exists to postpone that death. She slows judgment down because in her hero system a verdict that precedes understanding is not merely wrong. It is the enemy’s signature.
Watch her in a studio in Virginia in late 2018. Tyler Cowen (b. 1962) sits across from her and opens with the question her whole book crawled toward: are virtuous people easy to dislike? “Not to me, but to many others,” she says, and then tells him the hostility surprised her when she began. She had written about people who gave a kidney to a stranger, and when she described these donors to her friends, the friends reached for a diagnosis. Surely such people are mentally ill. The friends were not stupid. They were defending a hero system. A person who gives an organ to a stranger implies that the rest of us, who keep both kidneys and both cars, have miscounted what we owe. The diagnosis was a border patrol. MacFarquhar noticed the patrol, found it stranger than the donors, and wrote Strangers Drowning about the patrol as much as the donors. That is her hero move in miniature. Where others defend the wall, she reports from both sides of it.
Every hero system runs on a subtraction, the thing removed from the picture so the project can feel like truth. MacFarquhar’s subtractions are famous in her trade and she narrates them herself. She cut physical description from her book because, as she told The Guardian in 2015, “if you’re looking at someone’s physical appearance, you’re on the outside.” She cut quotation because a quote holds the subject at arm’s length, an exhibit tagged and introduced. She cut the first person because the writer’s I stands between reader and subject like an usher who will not sit down. She removed her body, then her voice, then her verdict, and she called the removals intimacy.
The subtractions go deeper than method. In college it occurred to her that the most moral available life was to graduate, earn a fortune, and give the money away. She did not do it. Years later, asked at The Rumpus whether she had considered living as her do-gooders live, she declined every noble cover story. “I did it because I love it,” she said of writing. That sentence is the founding subtraction of her hero system. She ran the moral arithmetic, saw its answer, and subtracted its claim on her own life, and then she spent a decade embedded with the people who had refused the exemption she granted herself. The book that resulted is many things, and one of them is the return of the subtracted claim, a woman circling the life she calculated and declined, interviewing the people who said yes.
There is a further subtraction she narrates less. Delay is not neutral. A writer who withholds judgment for ten thousand words has not stepped outside the business of judging. She has judged that this life deserves ten thousand words, that this mind rewards entry, that the reader’s easy verdict is the thing to be defeated. The withholding is itself a verdict on verdicts. Free indirect style, her borrowed instrument, compounds the problem, because the subject’s inner weather on her page is a made thing, the writer’s mind wearing the subject’s clothes, and the reader who believes he has entered Derek Parfit has entered MacFarquhar’s Parfit, a construction so persuasive it forecloses the versions she did not build. Her hero system requires her to experience this construction as transmission. Every hero system requires something like that.
Now take her sacred words one at a time, because the words are where hero systems reveal themselves. A sacred value looks universal from inside the system that holds it. Step outside and the same word means something else, sometimes the opposite thing, and the man who assumed his meaning was the meaning discovers he has been speaking a dialect all along.
Start with inside, her most sacred word. For MacFarquhar, inside names the destination of all serious attention, the interior of another consciousness, and getting there is the moral act her heroism is built on. The word does other work elsewhere. For a Teamster on a loading dock, inside means the union, the protected circle of men who have each other’s backs, and a man trying to get inside your head is a company tactic. For a Havana dissident, inside means the prison he organizes his courage around. For a claustrophobic mine rescuer, inside is where the trapped men are and the price of heroism is entering it. For a cloistered Carmelite, inside names the soul’s rooms where God waits, and the interior life is the only life, though she means by it almost the reverse of what MacFarquhar means, since the nun goes inward to escape other minds and meet her Maker, while MacFarquhar goes inward through other minds and expects to meet no one but them. Same word. Five hero systems. Five destinations.
Take attention. In MacFarquhar’s system attention is the substance of love and the precondition of justice, hours of it, whole days of interviews that walk a subject through his life from the beginning, a discipline she says can become revelatory for the subject too, since no one asks a man about the long movements of his life. In a homicide detective’s hero system, attention is suspicion with a notebook, and the man receiving it should worry. In the hero system of a floor trader, attention is inventory, bought and sold by the millisecond, and a firm upstream harvests his own while he works. For the mother of a newborn, attention is not a virtue she cultivates. It is a siege condition, and the saints of her order are the ones who kept paying it at four in the morning through an ocean of fatigue. For a Beijing censor, attention is the threat model, the thing that must never concentrate on the wrong object, and his heroism consists of dispersing it. MacFarquhar’s readers tend to assume attention is self-evidently good because their hero systems and hers share a border. Half the world holds no such assumption.
Take goodness, the word her book interrogates for three hundred pages. Inside the do-gooder’s hero system, goodness is wartime duty, unlimited in principle, and the drowning strangers are always in the water, so every dollar kept and every evening at the movies is triaged against a death somewhere. MacFarquhar rendered that system so faithfully that readers report thinking these people are insane on one page and am I insane not to think this way on the next. Inside her friends’ hero system at the dinner party, goodness is proportion, a decent job, checks to good causes, kindness within reach, and the donor of a kidney to a stranger has broken the scale and must be explained. Inside the effective altruist’s system, goodness is arithmetic, and sentiment about proximity is a rounding error to be trained away. Inside a tribal and traditionalist hero system, the one this writer works from, goodness begins at home and thins with distance by design, because a man’s own people hold first claim on him, and the drowning mother is the answer to the philosophy professor’s question, not the puzzle. Inside the mafia soldier’s system, goodness is loyalty enforced, and the man who reports his cousin to the police has committed the one unforgivable act. MacFarquhar’s achievement was to display several of these systems side by side without pretending they reconcile. Her book’s quiet finding is Becker’s finding. “Why are we hostile toward do-gooders?” she asked her Kirkus interviewer, and the answer is that a do-gooder is not a nicer version of us. He is a rival hero system walking, and his existence, if credited, unmakes ours.
Take disappearance, her strangest sacred value and the anchor that separates her from every chronicler this series has covered. Other writers built their heroism on voice, byline, presence, the self enlarged until it could not die quietly. MacFarquhar built hers on removal. No body on the page, no I, no verdict, the writer thinned to a pane of glass. In her system disappearance is generosity, the usher finally sitting down so the reader can see. In a ghostwriter’s system, disappearance is the wage, resented and priced. In the system of a witness protection officer, disappearance is survival engineered. For a monk under obedience, disappearance is the death of pride, practiced daily. For a depressed man on a bridge, disappearance is the temptation his people pray he resists. And here Becker earns his keep, because MacFarquhar’s disappearance is also the most refined bid for immortality available in her trade. The visible hero can be argued with, dated, buried. The invisible one enters the bloodstream. Connoisseurs recognize a MacFarquhar paragraph without a byline, the way one recognizes a builder by his joints, and her method now propagates through younger writers who absorbed it without knowing its source. She subtracted her name from the sentence and the sentence carries her anyway. Renunciation, in her guild, outranks display, and she renounced her way to the top of it.
Set one rival system on its feet properly, since a hero is best measured against a live opponent. Take the newsroom. The daily reporter’s hero system holds that the verdict is the product. The public pays for judgment rendered under deadline, the corrupt official named, the lie called a lie by nightfall, and a reporter who spends fourteen months inhabiting one mind while the city burns has purchased his refinement with other people’s ignorance. In that system MacFarquhar’s delay is a luxury good, subsidized by a magazine that can afford patience, consumed by readers who enjoy the sensation of suspended judgment the way rich men enjoy slow food. The activist’s adjacent system presses harder. Understanding, the activist says, is what power asks for when it wants time. The strangers are drowning now. They do not need free indirect style. They need the rope, and every year spent rendering the interior weather of a philosopher is a year of ropes not thrown. MacFarquhar has heard both cases. Her answer, implicit across the work, is that judgment without entry is the disease these systems die of, that the daily verdict and the activist’s certainty both run on cartoon versions of their enemies, and that someone must keep the technology of entry alive or every fight becomes a fight between cartoons. The rival systems answer back that entry technology arrives too late for the drowned. Neither side wins. That is what makes them hero systems rather than arguments.
How much of this does she see? More than most subjects of this series. She knows the writing life fails her own moral test and says so without flinching. She knows her subjects’ extremity indicts her, and she published the indictment. She knows the hostility toward do-gooders is a defense and named the thing defended. Her sentence about her subjects, “What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence,” cuts her too, and she seems to know it, since the knowledge her do-gooders forced on themselves, that comfort is purchased, is knowledge she now carries and writes under. What she names less is the power in the pane of glass. The reader who finishes a MacFarquhar profile believes he judged for himself. He judged inside a chamber she built, from evidence she selected, in a rhythm she composed, and the freedom he feels is partly her most sophisticated effect. A writer this alert to the self-flattery of every other hero system has been gentle with the self-flattery of her own, the belief that transmission can be innocent, that a made intimacy is intimacy. Perhaps she extends to herself the patience she extends to everyone. Perhaps the system cannot run without the belief, which is Becker’s oldest point.
Her current project, the unfinished book on staying or leaving a hometown, reads like the hero system auditing its own foundation. She left a country at sixteen. Her parents’ trade was interpreting one civilization to another. The woman who spent thirty years entering other minds now studies the people who never left home, the ones whose hero systems are inherited whole, place and kin and church, no entry required because no one ever stepped outside. Sibling pairs, one who left and one who stayed. She is holding her own founding choice up against its road not taken, and she is doing it in the only register she trusts, someone else’s life, rendered from inside.
The hero is a woman who treats the wall between minds as the primary human emergency, who earns significance by breaching it, and who has thinned herself nearly to transparency so the breach will feel like the reader’s own, a hero whose signature act is the staged abolition of the self that performs it.
The unnamed rival: the immediate world, the hero system of the near, which holds that a mind is known by feeding it dinner for forty years rather than interviewing it for forty hours, that the people entitled to a man’s interior are the ones who share his roof and his graveyard, and that a stranger’s understanding, however exquisite, is a visit and not a home.
The cost the ledger cannot price: whatever she was going to say. Thirty years of sentences and almost none of them in her own voice, the verdicts unrendered, the I subtracted, a writer of the first rank whose collected works contain, by design, no record of what she saw when she finally got inside, except the record dissolved into everyone else. She bet that the breach was worth the silence. The bet cannot be settled while the bettor lives, which is the mark, Becker would say, of every wager worth the name.
The Buffer and the Breach: Larissa MacFarquhar Through Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) argues in A Secular Age (2007) that the deepest change in Western life over the past five hundred years was a change in the self. The man of 1500 was porous. Meanings lived outside his mind, in relics, curses, blessed candles, black moods that could enter him like weather, demons that could take up residence. He did not have a boundary he could man. The world reached in. The modern man is buffered. He carries a boundary between inside and outside, holds that meanings exist only in minds, and experiences the world as neutral material on the far side of the glass. The buffer was an achievement. It bought safety, autonomy, and freedom from terror. Taylor’s point, pressed across nine hundred pages, is that the purchase had a price, and the price was a flatness the buffered man feels but cannot name, a suspicion that something was closed off when the boundary went up.
Larissa MacFarquhar has spent thirty years working the boundary. She writes profiles for The New Yorker, and her stated goal, repeated across decades of interviews, is to put the reader inside another mind, seeing what the subject sees, thinking in the subject’s rhythm. Read through Taylor, this is not a craft ambition. It is a porosity operation conducted on buffered readers, and her entire method, from the subjects she picks to the sentences she cuts, follows from one insight she may never have put in Taylor’s terms. The modern reader judges from behind glass. Her work exists to open the window.
Start with the method. Around the writing of Strangers Drowning (2015), MacFarquhar removed physical description from her portraits. She explained the cut to The Guardian in October 2015: “if you’re looking at someone’s physical appearance, you’re on the outside.” She removed quotation where she could, because a quote presents the subject as an exhibit, framed and held at distance. She removed the first person, because the writer’s I stands at the window narrating the view. Each subtraction takes down a pane. What remains is free indirect style, the novelist’s technique in which the narration absorbs the vocabulary, tempo, and anxiety of the subject’s mind, so that the reader stops observing a consciousness and starts running it. Fiction has used the technique since Jane Austen (1775-1817). Reported journalism almost never touches it, because it requires the writer to reproduce an inner life without inventing one, and most reporters lack either the hours or the nerve. MacFarquhar built her career on it. In Taylor’s language, she engineered a breach in the buffer, a controlled and temporary porosity, delivered in prose, to people who would never seek the condition by any other route.
The subjects she chose confirm the reading, because again and again she picked people whose buffers had failed, thinned, or never formed.
Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is her limit case. Her 2011 profile of the Oxford philosopher shows a man porous at every level Taylor names. Parfit absorbed the moods of the people around him. If the person in the room was unhappy, the unhappiness entered him and he could not keep it out. He described his own thinking as work done by unseen civil servants in a back room while the minister at the desk sat idle, a self experienced as staffed rather than owned. And his philosophy dissolved the buffer on paper. Parfit argued that personal identity is a shallower fact than people assume, that the wall between one person and the next has less standing than we grant it, and he reported that the argument consoled him. Other people came closer. His own death receded in importance. Taylor describes the porous self of 1500 as one that could not draw a line between itself and the field of forces around it. Parfit reached a version of that condition through analytic argument, porosity rebuilt from the inside with premises and conclusions, and MacFarquhar rendered him so faithfully that readers felt the draft through the open window. Her profile does not present a mind with unusual views. It presents a man living without the standard modern equipment, and it lets the reader try the condition on.
The do-gooders of Strangers Drowning are the case generalized. The people in that book, the nurse under death threats in Nicaragua, the couple raising twenty-two children in Philadelphia, the young Boston pair giving away most of their income, the priest counseling the suicidal in Japan, share one trait beneath their differences. Suffering at a distance reaches them. The buffered self, Taylor writes, can regard the world’s pain as information, real but external, arriving with no claim attached. The do-gooder has no such filter. A famine on another continent enters him with the force of a fire in his own kitchen, and he arranges his life accordingly, because he has no way to stop the entry. MacFarquhar saw this and named its cost in a sentence Taylor could have written: “What do-gooders lack is not happiness but innocence.” The innocence in question is the buffer, the merciful glass that lets the rest of us eat dinner while strangers drown. Her subjects lost it or gave it up, and her book studies what a life looks like when the modern self’s principal defense is gone.
Then the book turns, and the turn is the strongest evidence for the frame. Between the profiles, MacFarquhar wrote a history of the hostility that porous people attract, and the history she wrote is, without the vocabulary, a history of buffer construction. Literature taught readers to find the saint tedious and the charming sinner lovable, training taste to side with the defended self. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his descendants supplied a diagnostics that converts open boundaries into symptoms, so that a man undone by strangers’ suffering could be explained rather than heard. The codependency movement of the 1980s taught millions that helping past a certain point is a disease with a recovery program. Evolutionary debunking reduced altruism to strategy, kin math and reputation, nothing entering from outside because there is no outside worth the name. Each of these is a course of masonry. Each thickens the wall and hands the man behind it a reason to distrust anyone who lives without one. MacFarquhar assembled the sequence because she kept meeting the finished product. When she described kidney donors to her friends, the friends reached for a diagnosis. Surely such people are mentally ill. Taylor gives the reaction its right name. The buffered self, confronted with a porous one, does not experience curiosity. It experiences threat, because the porous man’s existence suggests the wall is optional, and the wall is the modern self’s founding purchase.
Taylor has a word for what the wall does not fully keep out. The buffered identity, he writes, lives cross-pressured, haunted by the fullness it excluded, prone to moments when the flatness of the disenchanted world becomes suddenly unbearable. MacFarquhar’s profiles operate on exactly that vulnerability. Readers of Strangers Drowning report a signature oscillation, one page thinking these people are crazy, the next page wondering whether the craziness is their own. That oscillation is cross-pressure staged and administered. The book does not argue the reader out of his buffer. It seats him at the window, opens it for three hundred pages, and lets him feel the temperature difference. Some readers close the window and file the experience under literature. A few, and the effective altruist community contains documented cases, left the window open and rebuilt their lives around what came through.
Her institutional reporting runs the same inquiry through harder rooms. The dementia pieces ask whether caregivers should enter a patient’s false world or keep correcting it, and the question is a boundary question. The patient’s buffer is failing. Meanings, persons, and decades no longer stay sorted. The caregiver who joins the patient’s world practices a deliberate porosity, letting the patient’s reality displace her own for the length of a visit, and the family that refuses, insisting on the one true calendar, defends a wall the disease has already breached. MacFarquhar, asked by Tyler Cowen (b. 1962) in 2018 whether she would want to be lied to in that condition, and whether she would apply her answer to a child or a sibling, drew the problem out and then admitted she did not know. The admission fits the corpus. She has spent a career demonstrating that the boundary can be opened, and she declines to legislate when it must be.
Her biography sits under all of this at an angle worth stating. She grew up in a home that interpreted one civilization to another, left England at sixteen, trained at Harvard, and settled in Brooklyn inside the most buffered idiom on earth, the secular, literary, credentialed metropolis, where irony guards every window and enchantment survives as a design preference. She is, by residence and register, a buffered self. The porosity in her work is manufactured, hour by hour, in interviews that walk a subject through his life from the beginning, and it is revocable. She opens the window on assignment and goes home. Taylor’s porous man of 1500 had no such option. The spirits did not wait for the reporting trip to end. This is the limit of the operation and she seems to know it. A porosity with an off switch is a buffered man’s porosity, tourism across the boundary rather than life on the far side, and the reader’s un-buffering lasts, in most cases, the length of the piece. Taylor might go further. He might say that porosity without ontology, openness with no spirits, no God, no binding claims on the far side of the glass, is a mood rather than a condition, and that MacFarquhar delivers the sensation of the porous world while withholding its furniture. Several of her subjects had the furniture. Baba Amte (1914-2008) built his leprosy colony inside a lived religion. The priest in Japan counsels the suicidal from within one. The book renders their porosity while remaining agnostic on their metaphysics, which is the buffered settlement in miniature, all the experience, none of the commitment.
Her unfinished book on hometowns brings the inquiry home. The project follows sibling pairs, one who left and one who stayed, and asks how the decision shapes a worldview. Read through Taylor, the stayer and the leaver divide along the old line. The man who stays in the town he was born in lives porously toward place. The graveyard holds his name, the church holds his family’s pew, the neighbors hold his history, and his identity is distributed across a geography that reaches into him whether he consents or not. The man who leaves converts all of that into memory, portable and private, meanings relocated inside the one mind that departs. MacFarquhar left a country at sixteen. The woman who buffered early and completely now studies the people who never did, and she studies them with the same instrument she brought to Parfit and the do-gooders, entry, rendered from inside. The second book, when it comes, will test whether her method can honor a porosity of place the way it honored a porosity of persons, and whether the leaver can render the stayer without condescension, which no American publication reliably manages.
What does the frame yield in the end? A unification. Her corpus looks scattered, philosophers, judges, altruists, dementia wards, custody courts, small towns, until Taylor’s distinction sorts it, and then every major piece falls on one line. She finds the people who live without the buffer, renders the condition from inside, and administers the experience to readers who possess the buffer in its most developed form. The hostility her subjects attract, which she made a book of, is the buffer defending its founding purchase. The style she invented, subtraction by subtraction, is a window-opening technology. The oscillation her readers report is Taylor’s cross-pressure, produced on schedule. No other frame gathers the corpus this economically, and no one, so far as the published record shows, has read profile journalism through A Secular Age at all, perhaps because the people who read Taylor and the people who study magazine writing sit in different buildings.
One question remains open, and it should stay open. Taylor wrote his history with a thumb on the scale, a Catholic’s suspicion that the buffer cost more than it bought. MacFarquhar keeps her thumb off. She has never said the porous life is better. She has said the porous life exists, that it can be entered, that the people living it are neither saints nor patients, and that the wall between the reader and them can come down for an afternoon. Whether an afternoon changes anything, whether engineered porosity is a door or an amusement, her work cannot settle, because the answer unfolds in readers after the piece ends, out past the last sentence, where no reporter follows.
Two People in a Room: Larissa MacFarquhar Through Randall Collins
Randall Collins (b. 1941) argues in Interaction Ritual Chains (2004) that the basic unit of social life is two or more bodies in a room. Building on Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) and Erving Goffman (1922-1982), he lists the ingredients of a successful ritual: bodily co-presence, a barrier against outsiders, a mutual focus of attention, and a shared mood. When the ingredients combine, the participants entrain, their rhythms sync, and the encounter generates what Collins calls emotional energy, a charge of confidence and drive that each person carries away. The encounter also generates sacred objects, symbols soaked in the group’s attention, which members defend afterward with a heat that puzzles outsiders. A life, in this account, is a chain of such rituals, each one funding or draining the next, and a career is the record of which rooms a person got into and what happened there.
Larissa MacFarquhar (b. 1968) makes her living in a room Collins never analyzed. The room contains two people. One asks. One answers. There is no camera, no audience, no clock that matters. The sessions run for hours and recur across weeks, and the questions do not concern the weekend or the news. They walk the subject through his life from the beginning, decade by decade, decision by decision. MacFarquhar has said these conversations become revelatory for the subject, since almost no one asks a man about the long arc of his life, and almost no man has told it. She reports subjects surprised by their own answers, hearing their lives assembled for the first time.
Run the checklist and the interview scores as a ritual of the first intensity. Co-presence, yes, hour upon hour of it. A barrier, yes, the closed door, the off-record surround, the understanding that this room excludes everyone else on earth. Mutual focus, yes, and of a purity ordinary life rarely permits, two adults attending to a single object without interruption for an afternoon. Shared mood, built in the Collins way, incrementally, through rhythm, as question and answer entrain and the pair begin to finish a thought together. And the sacred object emerges on schedule. The life story, spoken whole for the first time, becomes charged for both parties. The subject discovers he has one. The writer leaves with it.
Both leave with emotional energy too, which explains features of the trade that craft talk cannot. Subjects give MacFarquhar dozens of hours they refuse to give anyone else, and they do it for the reason people return to any high-intensity ritual. The sessions feel like more life than the days around them. A man narrating his existence to a listener of total attention gets, for an afternoon, the experience Durkheim located in the festival, the self enlarged by concentrated regard. MacFarquhar, for her part, has run this ritual for thirty years with philosophers, judges, nurses, priests, and presidents, and Collins would read her stamina as EE economics. The interviews charge her. Writers burn out on deadlines and editors. They rarely burn out on the room.
Then comes the strange move, the one that makes her a Collins case worth writing up. She deletes the ritual from the record. Her published method removes the first person, the writer’s body, the questions, the scene of the telling. The profile presents the subject’s inner life as if it had transmitted onto the page without an intermediary, when in fact every insight in it was forged in a two-body ritual whose second body has been erased. The reader receives the sacred object with the ritual scrubbed off, a relic without its shrine. Collins holds that symbols keep their charge only through the chains that produced and renew them. MacFarquhar bets the other way. She bets that the charge survives the deletion of the encounter, that a life story assembled between two people in a room can pass to a stranger on a train, and her career says the bet pays.
It pays because she rebuilt the ritual inside the prose. Collins ranks solitary reading among the weakest rituals, a low flame fed by internalized symbols, no co-presence, no entrainment, minor EE. Free indirect style, her signature instrument, attacks each deficiency. The narration takes on the subject’s vocabulary, tempo, and anxiety, so the reader’s inner voice entrains to another mind’s rhythm, which is the closest print comes to bodies syncing in a room. The mutual focus is enforced by ten thousand words on a single consciousness. The barrier is the piece’s length, which expels every reader unwilling to commit an evening. Her profiles simulate the ingredients of the encounter that produced them, and the simulation runs hot enough that readers report the aftereffects of ritual, the charged symbol, the raised pulse, the urge to defend or attack the subject as if they had met him.
Her subjects sort along Collins lines as well. Derek Parfit (1942-2017), her limit case, was an entrainment instrument with no volume control. He absorbed the moods of anyone in the room and could not keep out another person’s unhappiness. Collins treats entrainment as the engine of solidarity, a capacity that normal buffering keeps in check. Parfit lacked the check. MacFarquhar rendered a man whom every interaction ritual swept away, and her hours with him were, by the logic of the frame, rituals of unusual voltage, one participant professionally attentive and the other constitutionally unable to hold anything back.
The do-gooders of Strangers Drowning present the opposite puzzle, and Collins sharpens it. Emotional energy, in his model, comes from successful rituals with co-present others, which is why people conform. The group is the power supply. Her do-gooders defy their groups for decades, give kidneys to strangers, give income to foreigners, adopt twenty children, and absorb the hostility of every dinner table they sit at. Where does the current come from? Some draw on movement rituals, the effective altruists with their meetups and pledges, the believers with their congregations, chains that recharge deviance weekly. Others run on internalized symbols almost alone, the drowning child carried in the head for forty years, and Collins regards that fuel as rare and expensive, which fits the exhaustion and strain her book records. The dinner table hostility also comes straight from the model. A kidney donor at dinner breaks the shared mood, devalues the table’s sacred object, which is proportion, the settled sense that everyone present gives about the right amount. The company reaches for a diagnosis because a diagnosis repairs the ritual. Label the donor ill and the mood can resume.
Her own chain reads cleanly in this frame. Lingua Franca in the nineties, a small magazine where the rituals of academic status were the daily subject. The Paris Review, keeper of the trade’s relics. Then The New Yorker in 1998, the most consecrated room in American journalism, membership in which functions as a sacred object for a status group of writers and readers who tend it the way Collins says all such objects are tended, with reverence, jealousy, and border patrol. Each position raised her EE and her access to the next room, and access compounds, since the famous grant hours to a writer from the consecrated venue that they refuse to a writer from anywhere else. The chain is now self-sustaining. Her presence in the room certifies the ritual before it begins.
The frame also prices the exchange, and the price should go in the record. The interview ritual is symmetrical while it runs and asymmetrical forever after. Both parties entrain, both leave charged, but one party keeps the sacred object. The subject gets an afternoon of concentrated regard and then becomes, permanently, the profile, his life story circulating in a version assembled in that room and finished in another, where he was not present. Some subjects spend years answering for sentences they spoke once, entrained, in a shared mood, behind a barrier, to the best listener they ever met. Collins teaches that rituals produce solidarity and symbols. He also teaches that somebody usually walks off with the symbols. In this trade the writer does, every time, and the erasure of the second body from the page makes the taking look like transmission. That is the tariff on the most humane method in American journalism, collected in a room with two people in it, recorded by neither.
If Mearsheimer’s anthropology is correct—that humans are profoundly social, tribal, and “embedded in a society” that shapes their moral codes through socialization and innate sentiment rather than atomistic reasoning—the do-gooders profiled by Larissa MacFarquhar in Strangers Drowning are not heroic individual rationalists. Instead, they are individuals who have undergone an intense, alternative form of socialization that leads them to identify with “strangers” as if those strangers were their own tribe.
Mearsheimer asserts that reason is the “least important” way humans determine preferences, and that by the time an individual develops critical faculties, family and society have already imposed an “enormous value infusion”.
MacFarquhar observes that for do-gooders, “it is always wartime”. Mearsheimer’s framework explains this: in wartime, societies widen the definition of “one’s own” to encompass a much larger group. Do-gooders have not transcended human nature; they have simply been socialized into a tribe that spans the globe.
When a do-gooder like Dorothy Granada or Julia Wise prioritizes strangers over their own biological family, they are not acting on “universal reason”. They are experiencing a conflict between two competing social identities. Mearsheimer would argue that their behavior is “unnatural” because it contradicts the innate sentiment to prioritize kin—the core of human survival.
MacFarquhar’s do-gooders often cite philosophers like Peter Singer, whose “shallow-pond” argument relies on a purely rational, individualistic calculus. The Limits of Reason: MacFarquhar notes that Aaron Pitkin’s dispassion towards animal suffering often stems from his need to adhere to his “base” (the animal-rights movement). Mearsheimer would argue that Aaron is not a lone wolf practicing utilitarian logic, but a member of a sub-tribe whose norms he must uphold to maintain his status.
MacFarquhar describes do-gooders as “cold-blooded” planners. Mearsheimer would suggest that this “coldness” is a defense mechanism against the “intense socialization” of their upbringing. By controlling their emotions with “heavy strata of ideas,” they are attempting to overwrite the innate sentiments that Mearsheimer claims are the true foundation of human behavior.
Mearsheimer suggests that humans are “tribal at their core” and best survive by being “embedded in a society”.
MacFarquhar describes how do-gooders often isolate themselves from ordinary human fellowship. Mearsheimer would characterize this as a dangerous alienation. By attempting to live as “atomistic actors” who make decisions based on abstract principles rather than deep social attachments, do-gooders risk losing the support and protection of the very societies that are supposed to nurture them.
MacFarquhar discusses whether morality should be the “highest human court”. Mearsheimer would argue that it cannot be. Because humans are fundamentally social and tribal, a moral system that requires us to treat all humans equally—denying the special weight of family and tribe—is essentially asking us to fight against our biological and sociological programming.
In this view, the “do-gooders” are not the most evolved humans; they are humans who have been re-socialized into an ideology of “impartiality” that conflicts with the structural reality of how humans have survived for millennia. Their struggle is not a triumph of reason over emotion, but a struggle between a new, abstract tribal loyalty and the ancient, deeply ingrained tribal loyalty to kin and close community.
Throughout her career at The New Yorker, MacFarquhar has specialized in long-form profiles of intellectuals, artists, and activists (such as Derek Parfit, Noam Chomsky, and Barack Obama). If Mearsheimer is right, MacFarquhar’s work is essentially a long-running project in mapping the “value infusion” of the modern elite.
Rather than treating her subjects as atomistic individuals making purely rational choices, MacFarquhar’s methodology which often involves immersing herself in their consciousness through “free indirect speech” reveals how their identities are constructed by the social and intellectual groups to which they belong.
Her fascination with “extreme altruists” in Strangers Drowning and her broader body of work highlights how even the most rational-seeming individuals are often driven by deep-seated social commitments and tribal loyalties that they may misidentify as “logic”.
MacFarquhar’s unique writing style, which avoids the first person and minimizes physical description to prioritize the “interiority” of her subjects, aligns with a Mearsheimerian view of the human experience.
By refusing to stand apart from her subjects as an objective, “atomistic” observer, she mirrors the idea that humans are “embedded” in the societies they inhabit.
Her technique of allowing a subject’s voice to “creep into the narration” acknowledges that an individual’s thinking is rarely their own; it is a reflection of the social discourse and pressures that have shaped them.
If Mearsheimer’s view that political liberalism’s focus on the individual is a “delusion” is correct, then MacFarquhar’s career functions as a subtle, ongoing critique of that very liberalism.
Her interest in people who make “drastic choices” (like the altruists in her book) is not an exploration of individual freedom, but an exploration of how far a person can push against their social programming before breaking.
MacFarquhar has expressed surprise at the “hostility and suspicion” the public feels toward extreme altruists. Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains this perfectly: the public’s hostility is the tribal “in-group” defending itself against a member who has socially defected to a “stranger” tribe, confirming that social cohesion, not individual merit, is the primary human driver.
If Mearsheimer is right, MacFarquhar’s career is less about profiling “great individuals” and more about documenting the hidden “engines” of socialization that drive the most influential people in our society. She is not writing about independent actors; she is writing about the most vivid manifestations of the social and tribal structures that Mearsheimer argues define us all.
How does MacFarquhar’s profile hold up in 2026? The headline is “The Conciliator.”
How did that work out?
You could argue that it holds up as an accurate examination of Barack Obama’s political temperament and rhetorical style. It correctly identifies his preference for incremental change over revolutionary rhetoric and his inclination toward synthesis and compromise, qualities that defined his political career.
The article highlights Obama’s early, conscious effort to present himself as a figure who could bridge partisan and cultural divides, a project he famously articulated in his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech. By analyzing his background, his books, and his interactions with voters, MacFarquhar identifies that his approach was not merely tactical but temperamental. Her assessment that his desire for unity was substantive rather than just political boilerplate anticipated a central tension of his presidency: the frustration of supporters who wanted more aggressive, “Churchillian” fights and the skepticism of opponents who viewed his conciliatory language as a mask for traditional liberal goals.
The profile also identifies the “Burkean” streak in his thinking. His skepticism toward grand, abstract theories of social engineering and his respect for existing institutional structures, even when imperfect, proved accurate. The piece notes his awareness that charisma and rhetoric often create an illusion of progress that can crumble if not anchored in durable organization and incremental, local work.
Obama failed to conciliate anything. He bequeathed America Donald Trump.
The very temperament MacFarquhar praises such as the calm detachment, the insistence on synthesis, and the belief that the system is essentially sound failed to address, and perhaps even exacerbated, the rot in the American political body. From this angle, Obama’s brand of “unity” was perceived by millions of voters as an elite project that ignored their material decline. By acting as a steward of the status quo during the post-2008 recovery, he left vast swaths of the electorate feeling that the system cared more about institutional continuity than their own survival.
When the profile describes his “conservative” skepticism of rapid change, the critic sees not wisdom, but a paralysis that fueled popular rage. Where MacFarquhar sees a doctor calmly diagnosing the body politic, the critic sees an administrator who offered palliative care while the underlying condition worsened. The “unity” Obama sought, rather than bridging the divide, perhaps widened it by creating an opening for a figure who discarded the language of consensus entirely in favor of an overt, aggressive challenge to the established order.
If one adopts the frame that Obama’s approach to governance and his focus on procedural legitimacy left the political system vulnerable, then his “conciliatory” nature becomes the very mechanism that alienated a base which felt abandoned. In this sense, the “freakish self-possession” the profile identifies might be interpreted not as strength, but as a fatal insulation from the depth of the national frustration that Trump would later mobilize.
